Is your distribution depended of “Megadodo’s”?

The publishing possibilities Internet has provided us with is astonishing. Not many gives it much of a thought but if we go back twenty-five years the publishing world was almost completely different from today. Back then, the Internet was just about to start on the path we today know as the World Wide Web, and no one imagined how it would end up dominating content distribution.

Some imagined it of course. We would not be where we are today otherwise.

My favorite foreseer was the writer Douglas Adams. It is remarkable how his idea of a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy matches some of the basics of the Internet today.

The book he imagined was a tablet, or what Adams described as “a small, thin, flexible lap computer”, that served as the standard repository for all knowledge and wisdom in the known Universe. The book continuously updated itself through some sort of beaming technology that made new content instantly available for its users.

The book was controlled by Megadodo Publications, a publisher company on a planet called Ursa Minor Beta. It was not the biggest publishing company, but by far the most successful. It decided what to publish in their guide of course, and when new data was distributed to the book users.

Internet is not a guidebook but if you stop and think, it is not that different when it comes to content distribution.

Photo by Sebastian Spindler on Unsplash

Even though there are billions of content contributors, we have our Megadodo’s and they are both very successful and holds much power on how and where your content is available for the end users. They do not control all Internet distribution and content production like the imaginary Megadodo Publishing did, however they are big enough to have a major impact on the publishing industry and many self publishers fully depend on at least one of them.

Do not get me wrong. Platforms like Facebook, YouTube or Medium are very useful and good services you should use if it benefits you. The price you pay is locking in your content to their business logic and algorithms, though, and they own your content through terms of service contracts. You can delete your content, but as long as it stays on their platform they probably have all rights to exploit and treat it as they want. Even deleting it.

It does not have to be this way. Publicisto gives you an opportunity to free your content from the dependency of other platforms and publishers (the Megadodo’s) and makes your combined content visible and traceable on your own domain and name.

When you use Publicisto, you publish all your content to a depository you fully control and own. The depository has a front that function as a “homepage” and store front where you manage how your content is displayed and available. You can connect your depository to all the Megadodo’s you want, and control how and what to re-publish to them.

You get the better of two worlds. You can use the different platforms and take advantage of their services as before, while you at the same time get all the benefits from having all your combined content published to your own domain. Not only do you gain high visibility and make your content easier to find, you get to keep your originals published independent from other platforms.